Free Surface by Stacy Robinson

and walked out of the room.
     
    They waited in Nicholas’s room for the doctor, Claire on one side of the bed, Michael on the other, the alternating pings and sloshing noises from the monitors and ventilator punctuating the silence between them. A nurse poked her head in to tell them that Dr. Marks had been delayed for another half hour. Before Claire could respond, Michael stepped around the bed, placed his palm on the small of her back and steered her out of the room and down the corridor to the elevators. “C’mon,” he said. Nothing more. They stepped into the crowded compartment, and Claire felt a split second of relief at seeing all the floors lit up. Five stops to think; five stops until the moment of reckoning. She thought of Jackie’s advice, of full disclosure versus omission, but was unable to wrap her mind around anything more than vagaries.
    They got out of the elevator at the lobby, and as the pressure of Michael’s hand on Claire’s back grew she quickened her pace. They walked through the sliding doors and out into the gardens where patients in drafty blue gowns, some hooked up to rolling IVs, were smoking in the designated area. Claire imagined joking with Michael about the irony, as they would have done under any other circumstance. He released his grip from her shirt. The hot afternoon sun blazed and the heat gyrated in waves off the cement in the distance.
    “What the hell were you thinking, Claire? That you could screw some guy I was about to do a deal with, and we’d all live happily ever after?” He punched the Plexiglas smoking shelter on which she had been leaning. “Jesus Christ. Were you snorting coke off of each other’s naked bodies?”
    “What? God no!” she shouted through a flinch before regaining her equilibrium. Michael was not a violent man. He was proud, he could be arrogant, and he was hurt. But he would never physically harm her, she reminded herself. “It must have fallen out of his pocket. But I didn’t . . .” She took a deep, slow breath, and turned away from him.
    “Don’t, Claire,” he said. “Don’t lie to me. It’s not one of your strengths.”
    Claire’s body went rigid, but her mind filled with the relief of not having to construct lies she knew she couldn’t sustain. “I’m so sorry,” she said, coming around to him. “I made a terrible mistake and I’d give anything to take it all back.”
    “Yeah,” he replied, shaking his head. “In our home, for Christ’s sake.
    She squeezed her eyes shut, then open. “It wasn’t a rational choice, Michael. I don’t even know how I let it happen.”
    A woman pushed her husband past in his wheelchair, laughing with him as they moved toward the gardens.
    “Our son is in a coma because of—” He stopped short, looking utterly riven. He took several deep breaths. “Because of . . . your recklessness.”
    Claire stood there—exposed, contemptible, small—and watched her husband take her in. The lines of his face filled his features with weariness. And there was a sense of nervousness, she noticed, a darting and twitching of his eyes that conveyed some other preoccupation, as if he, too, struggled under the weight of some fateful secret. But she quickly shook off such deflections, knowing that she alone bore responsibility for bringing them to this frightening place. After several more deep breaths, Claire saw Michael’s face slacken, saw the hint of tears drying up before they could fall. The wheels were turning. She knew the look—business mode, spin. He moved away from her and paced the edge of the cactus garden with his arms folded, deep in tortured conversation with himself.
    When he returned a few moments later, he was stony. He didn’t ask if she still loved him, he didn’t say that he still loved her or that they would work through this together, as Claire had imagined and hoped he might. Michael announced that for now they would keep things as quiet as possible and maintain the story of an